Ubuntu 10.04 not sane for rtorrent + rutorrent

So I just pieced together a Zotac ZBox HD-ND02 and loaded Ubuntu 10.04 x64 Desktop on it. It loads great and runs blazing fast. Especially with 4 GiB of DDR3 1066 memory and the 500 GiB 7200 rpm hdd.

On a side note: It's a GREAT little machine. I enjoy it a lot.

My dilemma: I was big into linux and FreeBSD back in the day, but after college ran mostly Windows and in the past two years I've been running 100% Mac. So my linux is very rusty.

Anyway I'm setting this box up as a torrent host for legitimate software, indy music (house & trance mostly) and misc stuff. However, the base install of Ubuntu isn't sane for compiling and apt-get doesn't have anything of real use. All the howto's I found used things that Ubuntu didn't have (svn, xmlrc-c, etc). Even after getting GCC & G++ most of the makes fail.

My question: Is there something I'm missing? I shouldn't be running into this much trouble and I almost want to run back to SuSe or Gentoo. Even though they are more advanced they are easier for me. Ubuntu though, as I have found runs better out of the box on the system (everything just works, out of the box).